Archinect - News

What problems are really being solved by today's tech innovations?

2016-08-03T12:43:00-04:00

We are overloaded daily with new discoveries, patents and inventions all promising a better life, but that better life has not been forthcoming for most. In fact, the bulk of the above list targets a very specific (and tiny!) slice of the population. As one colleague in tech explained it to me recently, for most people working on such projects, the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do.

Last year Allison Arieff served as a juror on our competition, Dry Futures. Revisit some of the winners of the competition:

And check out an interview with Arieff here:

Meet the jury of Archinect's "Dry Futures" competition: Allison Arieff of SPUR

Meet the jury of Archinect's "Dry Futures" competition: Allison Arieff of SPUR

2015-08-20T18:20:00-04:00

Allison Arieff is the editorial director of SPUR, an urban planning advocacy non-profit based in San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland. Known in full as San Francisco Planning and Urban Research, SPUR is primarily focused on improving urban planning efforts and policy in the San Francisco Bay Area. We are excited and honored to have Allison as a jury member for our Dry Futures competition.

Previous to her role at SPUR, Allison served as editor in chief at Dwell magazine, which she helped found back in 2000. She is also a contributing writer to the Atlantic’s CityLab, the New York Times and SPUR’s The Urbanist.

Her work with SPUR and Dwell have brought popular attention to sustainable design initiatives and policy, and as a resident of San Francisco, she is well aware of the strains the drought has put on the state. But based on her work with local government and planning officials, she's also seen time and time again how inefficient or straight-up nonexistent our laws regarding water co...

"Unbuilt SF" showcases past and future Bay Area architecture projects

2013-08-20T21:49:00-04:00

If San Franciscans like to describe their city as “49 square miles surrounded by reality,” the visionary ideas that were too grandiose for even San Franciscans to consider remain some of the most fantastic designs for any city in the world. Imagine a grand casino on Alcatraz, the city wrapped in freeways and a subdivision covering flattened hills north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

San Francisco is a small yet fierce city; its 7x7 mile girth is home to a rich history of social activism, tech start-ups, foodies, artists, composting programs and absurdist housing rates. Given its compact and hilly terrain, any addition or subtraction would drastically impact the city’s image -- how do you regard a San Francisco without the Transamerica pyramid, or with a giant freeway at the Embarcadero? As part of the Architecture and the City Festival, the “Unbuilt San Francisco” exhibition provokes citizens to consider their relationship to the city through its architecture, by examining designs for past and future landmarks.

This exhibition may sound familiar -- down south in Los Angeles, the A+D Museum is exhibiting similar themes of architectural potential with Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin’s “Never Built” show. As discussed here on Archinect a few weeks ago, the unrealized plans featured in “Never Built” are all about past imaginations of a city trying to choose its path...